VIII: Garage: Bad Dream Adventure

Recommended by: my girlfriend Proxy

This game is slightly complicated to write my usual intro sentence about, so: GARAGE is a 1999 Windows/Mac adventure game by Kinotrope. That game never left Japan, and had a print run of only a couple thousand copies because the published stopped publishing CDs, so it was considered lost media until a used copy surfaced in the mid 2000s and got bought by...4chan's /vr/ board. Various 4chan people campaigned for the original developer to re-release this, and he eventually did, as Garage: Private Edition, in 2007; this also never left Japan. In 2020, this was reverse engineered and fan-translated by LoneDev, who released a patch for the Japanese version called GarageDoor. This version caught on more in niche circles of western gamers, leading to an actual remaster of the 1999 game being released in 2021 as Garage: Complete Edition for iOS and Android. Finally, in 2022, the iOS version was ported back to Windows, completing the circle and landing on Steam as Garage: Bad Dream Adventure.

Phew.

So, yeah, the development history of this game is completely insane. This isn't terribly surprising: this game is also completely insane. One of my conversations with Proxy about this game included the sentence "things I was not expecting from this game: vaguely rape-coded 1999 Sega Saturn FMV robot anal", and in the ensuing conversation, I mentioned that I was stunned she hadn't caught a Twitch suspension for streaming a game with onscreen robot fucking and several 1999 CG topless women, and got back I'm ALSO surprised I didn't catch a Twitch suspension due to it, probably ... due to the abstracted nature of a robot fucking something and dying after it cums. but also i didn't catch warnings from twitch for any of the bare tits, so! This is...one of those games, y'know? Where do I even start?

So, in one of our discussions, I mentioned that a thing I thought about often when playing it was the Sung-Won Cho egg delivery sketch. Garage has a lot going on, and almost none of it is actually fun. (Bear with me for a second lmao.) For example, this minigame is one of two main ways to make money in the game. (The other is setting a trap and waiting a real-world minute or so for crabs that you can sell to walk into it, which usually just means driving around in a circle setting traps 1-N and then retrieving trap 1 after setting trap N because it will have had time to fill up.) Neither of these activities is enjoyable. Both are, in fact, incredibly tedious. Steam says that I clocked about 11 hours on Garage. Two to three of those were fishing. The upgrades that give you more capacity for one of your two constantly-dwindling resources (Ego and Fuel; if either hits zero it is an instant game over, load a save, no autosaves) seem optional at first, but finishing the game isn't possible without every single available ego increase.

Playing this immediately after Pathologic II feels like a nice bit of synchronicity, because both are games in which the frustration, the tedium, the intentional lack of common QoL features like autosaving, etc, all combine to contribute to the (reset the clock) ludonarrative. But as I said in a recent conversation about Bravely Default: just because a game is making a narrative point by including extreme tedium doesn't mean that I have to enjoy it. The gameplay is almost entirely fetch quests and fishing minigames so you can do more fetch quests, and many of those fetch quests are framed like "go find a boat! it's somewhere, fucko!", leading to a lot of needing to hit your entire search space from the top again to see if an NPC suddenly has thoughts about boats.

So, now that I'm multiple paragraphs into talking about what an absolute slog this game is...

Everything about Garage other than the fact that actually playing the game part of this game mostly was an incredibly frustrating and tedious time? Absolute art-tier experience. It is an absolute marvel that this game got made, and the fact that it has been updated and modernized four separate times after being rescued from obscurity says a lot. The story and worldbuilding are wonderful, expanding from "you wake up in your bedroom, a robot who can only move around on train tracks, knowing nothing about the player character or his world" and, over time, expand into one of the most surreal pieces of media I've been through in a while. The game hits everything from societal gender roles to environmentalism to the Jungian shadow archetype, all packaged in a point-and-click adventure game with multiple talking frogs, on-screen FMV robot buttsex, four endings for some reason (which one you get being determined by which gas pump you date no I will NOT ELABORATE), a character with about twenty tits, that character having twenty tits turning out to be an absolutely critical plot point, and a music box that plays a track that, in-game, sounds like Pedestrian Deposit unleashed a beehive into a room full of snare drums and ran away, and which kills any robot who hears it. At one point this song gets played in a cutscene and your health bar decreases by about 75%; if this leaves it at zero at the end of the cutscene, you instantly die, and by this point I was so invested in the relentless fever dream that is this game's setting and plot that I couldn't even be mad about getting cutscene-killed.

Garage is...difficult to recommend, and it's absolutely a game that's only going to land for a certain small minority. For me, personally, I loved everything about this game that wasn't the actual game. That's a tough sell for anyone! But it's also probably the most original and uncompromised thing I will play this year, and it's nothing short of a marvel that it's 27 years old in its original form. Do you like your video games to be good games? You can probably pass here. Do you want to have an uncomfortably horny psychic robot mind prison FMV murder mystery happen at you for a dozen hours? You cannot do better than this.